Accessibility
There are currently 10 million people in the UK with some form of disability (source - Disability Rights Commission) - that's about one in seven of the population.
We are committed to ensuring that this website is accessible to the widest audience possible. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please contact us as we are continually striving to improve the experience for all visitors.
We include the following features designed to improve accessibility for users with disabilities:
- This website endeavors to conform to level Double-A of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
- This site has been built using code compliant with W3C standards for XHTML and CSS. The site displays correctly in current browsers and using standards compliant XHTML/CSS code means any future browsers will also display it correctly.
- Tab indexes are set such that the content links are presented first in the sequence they appear on the page.
- Links in the content show up as default link colours. They have no behaviors attached to them.
- Navigation items have background changes to highlight links and current page.
- Links are written to make sense out of context.
- Links to external web sites open up a new browser window where this is supported by the browser otherwise the same browser window is used.
- This web site can be navigated without the use of a mouse.
- All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes.
- Content has been separated from visual design and cascading style sheets (CSS) are used for visual layout.
- Only relative font sizes, compatible with the user specified "text size" option in visual browsers are used.
- If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
From time to time it is necessary for us to carry out changes and developments to areas of the website, unfortunately during these times these areas may not fully conform to our accessibility guidelines outlined above.
If you would like to find out more about making the web easier to use click here to visit the My Web My Way website which explains the many ways you can change your browser, computer, keyboard and mouse settings to make the web more accessible to you.